In this episode of VistaTalks, Elizabeth Doss joins host María Roa. Elizabeth is an animated GIF sticker artist. She helps brands and businesses create GIFs that lead to greater awareness and engagement on a local and global scale, whether through social media marketing, email marketing, or even a website. Elizabeth’s work in animated GIFs has already grown to over 4 billion views. 

Elizabeth shares how she got into the design world of animated GIFs and her Izzyink studio business, which now works with many well-known individuals, small businesses, and global brands. Elizabeth’s work transforms how people interact and engage with images across multiple platforms.

As an artist, Elizabeth creates custom GIFs and Instagram stickers for use on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms. She explains how this enables people to interact with their communities, build community, and increase engagement by using these animations that help show a different side of each business. María Roa asks Elizabeth how companies can use GIFs for breathing life into their marketing strategy. Elizabeth comments on how brands can build their custom reactions to things. For example, if their social media team is working on engagement, they can create a series of branded reactions. It can have a person’s face and logo. When added to how they say specific phrases, this can be very powerful, and they can read and react to other community content.

When putting a GIF in an email, it automatically starts playing because it is a Graphic Interchange Format with video. You have to click on a video for it to start, but if you’ve ever opened up an email and something’s changing color or the pictures are changing, that is usually a GIF.

On a global level, Elizabeth’s GIFs have now been seen over 4 billion times. The GIPHY platform is one of the best ways to search, share, discover and create GIFs on the Internet. The content on GIPHY’s website, app, and API is all of the best and most popular GIFs on the web, along with content created by talented GIF artists and world-class brands. 

GIPHY has an impressive 700 million visitors daily and serves up 10 billion GIFs per day, equating to 11 million hours of GIPHY content viewed daily. 

Elizabeth explains that if somebody has a verified brand account with GIPHY, you can search their handle (@ name) and find their GIFs. For example, Starbucks has its own set of GIFs, but if you want to see the official Starbucks ones, you search with the ‘@’ symbol. It is fascinating to look at how brands are using GIFs, and GIPHY is a robust platform that fuels the back end of most social media apps for GIF search. When you upload once to GIPHY, it’s available within a couple of hours on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Clubhouse, Slack, Twitter, and more.

If you can get someone to feel emotion through a GIF with your brand, you start building that trust factor because they have felt something – whether it’s funny, a brand message linked to a campaign, or you’re simply commiserating with them over a sports result.

Elizabeth discusses how the NFL uses GIFs effectively as a strategy for real engagement with their community and can even create GIFs in real-time while a game is taking place! The NFL has uploaded over 53,000 GIFs, which have been viewed 108 billion times. Another example María and Elizabeth discuss is Hallmark for their Christmas movies, and Elizabeth explains her work with LEGO® World Builder.